Watch his hands.
That was what the message had said. I had been doing it all week without meaning to.
I watched them at breakfast when he picked up his coffee cup. I watched them when he was on his phone, the way his thumb moved when he was reading something that bothered him versus something that did not. I watched them when he spoke and when he was quiet and when he set things down.
His hands were steady. Always. Completely controlled the way the rest of him was controlled. I had been watching for three days and I had not seen a single thing that looked like a lie living in them.
Which meant either the message was wrong.
Or he was better at this than I gave him credit for.
I did not know which one scared me more.
On Thursday, I asked Ethan, as casually as I could manage, whether Alexander had ever had any legal work done through firms other than his main counsel. Not directly about the surveillance file. Just fishing.
Ethan looked at me over his tablet, with the expression of a man who knew exactly what I was doing and had decided to let me.
"He uses two firms," Ethan said. "Both on retainer. Both are long-standing. Both are accessible if you know where to look."
He went back to his reading without saying anything else.
I sat with that. Two firms. Both are accessible. He had not said the file was there. He had not said it was not. He had given me just enough to keep looking and not enough to stop.
I was starting to understand that Ethan Cole gave information the way some people gave gifts. Deliberately. Thoughtfully. Never more than you needed at the time.
Friday came and I still did not have an answer.
It happened on a Friday night when I was not expecting it.
We had both been home all evening. He was working at the kitchen counter with his laptop and I was on the sofa with mine finishing the gala floor plan that had been giving me trouble all week. We were not talking. We were just in the same space in the comfortable way that had crept up on us without either of us deciding to let it.
That in itself was something I had stopped letting myself examine too closely.
Sometime around ten I got up for water and found him still at the counter but the laptop was closed. He was standing there with a glass of whiskey in his hand and not working. Just standing. Looking at nothing or looking at something inside his own head that nobody else could see.
I filled my glass. Turned around. He had not moved.
"Are you okay?" I asked.
He looked at me. As he had forgotten I was in the room and was finding his way back.
"Yes."
"You do not look okay."
He was quiet for a moment. Something shifted in his face. The controlled version of him settling slightly, like a coat slipping off one shoulder.
"It is the anniversary of my mother's death," he said. "I have not slept well this week. I never have."
My chest tightened. I thought about the photograph on his desk. Silver hair and those green eyes and that settled, earned quality in her face.
"How long ago?" I asked softly.
"Four years."
Four years. The same year my father had walked into Kane Global with evidence in his hands and trusted the wrong situation. The same year everything had started to unravel for both of us in ways neither of us had seen coming.
We had both lost people in the same year and never known it.
Something about that sat in my chest in a way I could not quite name.
"Do you want company?" I asked. "Or would you rather I leave you alone?"
He looked at me for a long moment. And in that moment something happened to his face that I had not seen before. The walls that were always up, always maintained, always so carefully in place, they went quiet. Not down exactly. Just quiet. Like a man who was tired of holding something up and had put it down for just a little while.
"Company," he said. Very low. Like the word had cost him something to say.
I sat on the counter across from him. He stayed where he was on the other side of the kitchen. There was space between us. But we were both there. Present. Not performing anything for anyone.
That felt like its own kind of rare.
"Tell me about her," I said.
He turned his glass in his hand. I looked at it.
"She was the only person I have ever known who could make me feel like a child and a man at the same time," he said. "She had no patience for self-pity. But she had patience for everything else. She was the person I called when I did not know what to do." He paused. "I have not known what to do about several things for four years."
My chest ached. Not for myself. For him. For the specific grief of a person who lost their compass and has been navigating without one ever since.
"I still talk to my father," I said. "His photograph. I know he cannot hear me but I tell him things anyway. What is happening? What I am thinking."
"Does it help?"
"Sometimes. Sometimes it just makes me miss him more." I looked at my water glass. "But I think that is okay. Missing someone is just love that has nowhere left to go. It does not mean the love stops. It just means it has to live somewhere else."
He was quiet for a long time after that. Looking at me in a way that felt different from how he usually looked at me. Less like an assessment. More like he was seeing something he recognised.
That is a good way to think about it," he said. Very quietly. Like he meant it for himself.
We stayed there. We talked the way people talk when they are not used to talking to each other yet but are finding their way in. Slowly. With pauses. He told me about his mother. Small things. The way she drank her tea. A habit she had of reading the last page of a book first to decide if it was worth her time. How she laughed, which apparently he had inherited and rarely used.
I told him about my father. Sunday mornings. The glasses pushed up his nose. The scratch on the kitchen table that nobody ever fixed because fixing it would have meant admitting it was there. The way he used to hum under his breath without knowing he was doing it.
I had not talked about any of that in two years. I had kept all of it locked away because looking at it directly hurt too much. But sitting in that kitchen at nearly midnight it came out easily. Gently. Like something that had been waiting for the right room.
I did not notice how close I had moved along the counter until I realised his arm was near enough that I could feel the warmth coming off him.
Neither of us had moved on purpose. It had just happened. The slow drift of two people who stop performing at a distance.
He felt it at the same moment I did.
I know because the quality of the air changed. That specific charged stillness. The kind that has a before and an after and you know in the middle of it that you are standing at the edge of something.
He looked at me. I looked at him. Neither of us moved or spoke.
Then he straightened up slowly. Set his glass down in the sink. And when he said goodnight his voice was controlled again but the control was working harder than usual and I could hear it.
"Goodnight, Sophia."
"Goodnight, Alexander."
He walked down the hall. His door closed.
I sat on the counter alone and pressed my hand flat against my sternum and felt my own heartbeat going faster than it had any right to.
This was not supposed to happen. I had come here with a contract and a plan and eyes wide open and somewhere between the coffee in the mornings and the two bowls on the counter and him sitting down when I told him to and tonight in the kitchen with his walls down and my father's laugh in my throat, somewhere in all of that I had made a mistake.
The mistake was that I had stopped pretending I did not feel it.
I went to bed but I did not sleep.
I lay in the dark thinking about his face when he said company like the word cost him something. Thinking about four years and both of us losing people in the same season without knowing the other one existed. Thinking about love with nowhere left to go and whether that was what this was starting to become.
My phone was on the nightstand. I did not pick it up. I was not ready for another message from an unknown number telling me something I did not want to hear tonight.
I just wanted one night where things felt like what they felt like without someone reminding me to be suspicious.
I closed my eyes.
I was almost asleep when I heard it.
A sound from the hallway. Footsteps. Slow and quiet, the way someone moves when they do not want to be heard. Stopping outside my door.
Not a knock. Just stopping.
A long moment of nothing.
Then the footsteps moved away.
I lay there staring at the ceiling with my heart loud in my ears.
He had stopped outside my door.
And then he walked away.
I did not know which one of those things scared me more.